There are many references in religion to childbirth.  Many of these references refer to childbirth as “dirty.”  The Bible, the Torah, the Koran all have passages that suggest the act of childbirth as being somehow “evil,” as if women are somehow possessed while giving birth.  There are references to women having to be “churched” after childbirth before they were considered clean.   I am not an expert on religious interpretation, but my guess is this ancient thinking was based on ignorance.  The power of birth was scary.  Life continued.  Women died.  A confusing dichotomy.  These disparities were maybe best described as being other worldly.  Easier to understand if it was the women’s fault.  She must be possessed by the devil  because she gave birth, she yelled in labor, the baby died, she died while giving birth.

After a recent religious service I attended with my husband, I complained about the misogyny of religion.  How women were often blamed for the greatness and the tragedy that is childbirth.  The further I thought, the more I began to think that maybe we have not changed that much since ancient times.

Are we still blaming women for the outcomes of childbirth?

RR

The campaign title:  “I Draw the Line Here,”  stems from the following incident:

The union said in a statement Thursday that the campaign follows a complaint it had received in the last week from a 24-year-old woman who said a 42-year-old disabled man asked her to provide sexual services as part of his care at home.

The young woman witnessed some of the man’s other nurses offering him sexual gratification, the union said. When she refused to do the same, he tried to dismiss her on the grounds that she was unfit to provide care.

Seriously?  Ugh.  I guess sometimes nurses can be their own worst enemies.  Regardless…..Seriously?  Patients expect sex as part of nursing care?  Seriously?

I. AM. DISGUSTED.

RR

The segment described how this new mom layed in bed for 30 hours, yes 30 HOURS!, after her surgery.  Flame me if you want, but this sounds like a negligence of NURSING care, pure and simple.  Basic nursing 101.  Surgery patients need to be ambulated early and frequently to prevent blood clots, which is what this new mom died of.  Sometimes I feel like (and correct me if I am wrong….cuz I know you will!) OB nurses neglect their postpartum moms.  It is easy to do.  These are young, healthy patients.  However, a C-Section patient is also a surgical patient, and should be treated as such.  Frequent assessments are warranted.  Fresh C-Section moms often complain about ambulating.  They are in pain, do not feel well, and walking is the last thing they want to do.  This is where nurses need to step in.  Help your patient ambulate!  Educate you patients on how important it is for their health.  Bolus them on their PCA (patient controlled analgesia) or give them a pain med, stabilize their incision, and help them to walk across the room!

The article also mentioned the relatively cheap intervention of SCDs (sequential compression devices).  These are fancy stockings and inflatable cuffs that wrap around your leg and “squeeze” them to force the blood through out the veins.  Now SCD’s are fine and dandy, and are slowly becoming the standard of care for C-Section patients  (I did not have them when I had my Section 6 years ago), but they are nowhere near as effective as walking.

I do also believe that the amount of C-Sections in this country needs to be decreased.  This is obvious.  Until that happens (which I truly believe will happen), please nurses, take this story as a wake-up call.  Be hypervigilant with your C-Section moms.

RR

Dr. Happy and his mullet says "hell yeah" to homebirth.

Who would have thunk it?  The Happy Hospitalist just published a post defending home births:  Home Birthing Experience Should Not Turn Women and Midwives Into Criminals.

For those who are not familiar, “Dr. Happy” is an internal medicine hospitalist who has  very strong (and sometimes bizarre) opinions on many areas of health care.  For instance, he has been known to defend Michael Jackson’s doctor for setting up a Dr. Frankenstein’s lab in his home, and often accuses nurses of not having critical thinking skills.

Thus, I was presently surprised to see Dr. Happy defending home birth based on scientific and common sense evidence.  Thank you Dr. Happy (that is until you write the next obnoxious post degrading advanced practice and staff nurses), for spreading some common sense.

RR

My conversation with my daughter was eye-opening and scary to me.  She lives with a very strong, feminist, nurse advocate, yet she believes nursing means you are are woman.  Nothin’ else.  This makes me very sad.  I failed at explaining to my own daughter what a nurse is.  I KNOW what a nurse is, but I could not explain it to my 6 year old.

So, dear readers, I need your help.  How would you explain to a 6 year old what the difference is between a doctor and a nurse?

RR

The best public health ad I have ever seen.  Ever.  I have tears in my eyes and goosebumps on my flesh.  This is how advertising should be done!  Beautiful!

RR

What would you do?  How would you feel?  You just breastfed a baby who was not yours.  It was a mistake.  Human error.  No physical harm was done to the moms or babies involved.  But…….what would you do?

I can only surmise what I would have done, or felt if I was put in this situation.  I can not imagine that it would be very traumatic for me to breastfeed another woman’s child in my exhaustion.  I would guess my attitude would have been, oops, oh well.  I may have felt very differently if it was MY baby who was breastfed by another woman.  But that is not what happened in this case in point.  I can never really know how I would have felt, or what I would have done.

When something like this happens in reality, when the wrong baby is brought to the wrong mom, litigation may follow.  Regardless of harm done.  Human error, mistakes, are inevitable in a hospital setting, and they are often unforgivable but the public.

So again I ask, what would you have done if you breastfed the wrong baby?

RR

Micro-Preemie Power, by Scott Wright, is a comic book journaling the NICU experience of Scott and Jodi Wright as they find themselves unexpectedly giving birth to a micro preemie. Their son, Morgan, was born 3 1/2 months premature weighing in at 1 pound 8 ounces.

This comic book is a very compelling and brutally honest look at life in the NICU.   I can speak of the realities of the NICU as a nurse, but not as a parent, which is the REAL reality.  The Wright family has given many NICU families a gift with the publication of this book.  It is a gift of the unabashed truth of what parents go through while trying to survive the NICU.

I would also like to thank the authors for not portraying the NICU nurses as dead-behind-the-eyes, silicone enhanced, over-sexed, doctor- stalking sluts,  that the majority of the media portrays as the reality of us nurses.  Just sayin’.

RR

Great headline.  Has nothing to do with labor and delivery.  I’m such a sucker.

RR